Managerial Accounting Research: Are We Just Describing Management Consulting Practice?

• Carlos Ruiz

  Author

This paper revisits a long-standing and provocative question about the identity of managerial accounting research: whether the academic community has progressed beyond merely cataloguing the techniques, fashions, and tools packaged by management consultancy firms, or whether it has built a cumulative, theoretically anchored body of knowledge of its own. Drawing on the spirited exchanges that appeared in the European Accounting Review and on the subsequent twenty years of subsequent reflection in Management Accounting Research, this paper argues that the answer is more nuanced than the suggestive title implies. The descriptive impulse is real and visible in topic selection across well-known techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard, Activity-Based Costing, and Economic Value Added, yet contemporary research has simultaneously built alternative theoretical foundations from economics, psychology, sociology, and practice theories. The critique that managerial accounting is "just" describing consulting practice, I argue, obscures three other dangers worth raising: methodological insulation from practice, theory-import without translation, and silent compliance with whatever consulting fashions dominate the business press. The paper concludes by endorsing a programme of interventionist and theoretically critical research that can simultaneously retain analytical rigour and societal relevance.

• PDF

Copyright (c) 2026 Review of Economic & Managerial Studies

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Allows users to: distribute and copy the article; create extracts, abstracts, and other revised versions, adaptations or derivative works of or from an article (such as a translation); include in a collective work (such as an anthology); and text or data mine the article. These uses are permitted even for commercial purposes, provided the user: gives appropriate credit to the author(s) (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI); includes a link to the license; indicates if changes were made; and does not represent the author(s) as endorsing the adaptation of the article or modify the article in such a way as to damage the authors' honor or reputation.